ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Unreliable Narrator by Araminta Hall

Posted on 23rd February 2026 By Nicola

Unreliable Narrator by Araminta Hall will be published by Pan Macmillan on 5th March 2026. My thanks to the publishers for the proof copy.

When Hope finds her real life in the pages of a bestselling novel, truth and fiction become blurred.

As a young woman, Hope’s dreams are as aspirational as her name. Curious and beautiful, she lands a job working for an up-and-coming author at his Somerset home. Drawn into the orbit of a glamorous bohemian elite, she quickly falls under the spell of this exotic world, which revolves around Ambrose Glencourt, his artist wife and their semi-adopted son, Tom.

But her time with them ends in a fatal disaster. She has kept the truth of those events a secret ever since.

Ten years on, Hope lives a lonely life that she has accepted not just as penance for what she did, but also to protect Ambrose. Except he hasn’t upheld his side of the bargain and is using her story in his new novel. And he has a very different tale to tell about what happened that summer . . .

But which one of them is a reliable narrator? And at what cost do you take control of the narrative of your own life?

When I read Araminta Hall’s first book, Everything and Nothing, back in 2011, I commented that I hoped the author would write more great reads like that one in the future. She certainly did, perhaps most notably her most recent book, One of the Good Guys, which I thought was brilliant. Now she’s done it again with Unreliable Narrator which drew me right into the world of Hope Jenkins and didn’t let me go until the end.

Hope takes a job as assistant to author, Ambrose Glencourt. As an aspiring writer herself it sounds ideal and she is soon fully assimiliated into the glamorous and dazzling life at Shadowlands with Ambrose and his wife. Hope tells her story in the form of a journal, but is she an unreliable narrator?

Hall’s skilled writing enables the reader to view events from an independent standpoint, less blinkered by the Glencourts’ allure or by Hope’s naivity. I still didn’t know the truth of the matter (although I had a good idea) but I loved every minute I spent finding it out. The second half of the book has a different style to it, leading to an ending which was poignant, ingenious and feministic, and which rounded off the story perfectly.

I thought Unreliable Narrator was extremely well-written, a first-rate story of subtle manipulation through one intense summer and its rippling effect over the following ten years.

Araminta Hall has worked as a writer, journalist and teacher. Her first novel, Everything & Nothing, was published in 2011 and became a Richard & Judy read that year. Her second, Dot, was published in 2013.

She teaches creative writing at New Writing South in Brighton, where she lives with her husband and three children.